Orcs might not till fields but they are more than capable of raiding Men who do. And there is livestock too - raided, or occasionally wild animals hunted down - I imagine the Orcs ate a lot of jerky. And the more organized Orc troops - Sauron's armies, Saruman's lot - have masters that find ways to supply the provender: Nurnen, as you said, and probably Dunland as Saruman's supplier of what cannot be grown in the remnants of his gardens. As for the slaves making up a significant portion of the Orcs' diet - I'm not sure how that argument even makes sense. How is it more efficient to keep shipping up batches of slaves to feed your army than to raise livestock for the purpose? In what way is that a more sustainable long-term strategy?
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Originally Posted by Boromir88
I'd also be interested in general thoughts about movie-canon and book-canon being mixed together. This definitely isn't the first writer to do it, and certainly won't be the last (there are countless internet self-proclaimed "Tolkien experts" doing this since the movies came out). Do we get to a point where the movie canon takes over the book canon as more fans combine the 2 types together?
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Sadly, at a glance, this article seems to be of the type where it works predominantly with movie-lore but uses chunks of books and even Enc of Arda (good resource in general but not the way it is used here) whenever it suits the author. Rather than it becoming a blend, I would say it's movie-canon which just makes use of the other canon as it sees fit, to bulk up its credibility. It's sort of like the age-old argument of "it's in the appendices". The answer, of course, is no it's not, but you want your theory to be true and so you mix and match contextless snippets to suit your purpose, because you don't want to admit that your theory is basically head canon.
But for the more general question - I think that we all tend to blend the book and movie lore to some extent, though it's a large spectrum. There is always something - some scene, some costume or actor's appearance, some line, some fact that sticks out more to you and you might not even be sure where it came from. For instance, Gandalf's famous "You shall not pass!" might not ring any discrepancy bells to book-readers, though his actual book line is "you cannot pass". Some degree of blending is inevitable. But I dislike it when people purposefully turn from one canon to the other completely ignoring the context of both to scavenge for arguments for their desired theory.